MyFace, SpaceBook, whatever

I keep hearing about something called Facebook. I don't know anything about it, but I think it seemed to me like it was a myspace sort of thing. I've never done the myspace thing, and I'm assuming the appeal of it is that you don't have to have your own website or pay for your own hosting server, and you can presumably search with some ease for your soulmate or worst enemy or whatever else you might be looking for. Maybe I've never been lured into that because I'm generally not all that social a person by nature. "Social butterfly" has never been a term that's been used to describe me. And my online presences aside, I'm not one to lay open all the details of my private life for a world of strangers to see. (But if you want to call me, anytime, feel free to dial 867-5309. The number is good in any area code.)

So I recently asked my twenty-something niece about Facebook. She tells me that it's like myspace to some degree, but it's more compartmentalized, so you can't just look at random people's info, but rather, it's a place where people apparently meet based on shared interests. OK, I can see how there are a few more restrictions there, but there's nothing to prevent someone from pretending to be interested in a certain subject as a way to get to know people.

The places I hang out most online to chit chat about one thing or another are all on discussion boards run by people I know or people I know of. Topics range from the silly to serious, and some people on the various boards know me in real life prior to my having joined the boards, some people are ones I've actually met in person and/or gotten to know very well online, and others are people with whom I only have interaction on the boards themselves and have no desire to ever have any interaction with in real life. I suppose I'm lucky in that I know people who run sites where I know I'm "safe". If you don't have the luxury of knowing similar people, and you want to be able to talk to people, where do you go? Are places like myspace and Facebook the modern equivalents of newsgroups? Has participation in newsgroups died down with the rise of these kinds of gathering sites? I still participate in one newsgroup and mostly lurk in another, a far cry from the multiple numbers of newsgroups I participated in when I was in college.

I could see if gatherings were restricted to these two sites. But it's not. I've heard of something called "friendster". I have no clue what that is. Yahoo apparently has some kind of group thing, as does Google, and there are also a billion discussion boards out there. And who knows what else. How are you supposed to figure out which site to belong to? Do you do it based on where your friends are? But if you're trying to meet new people, does it necessarily matter where your friends are? Do you join all of them and have the same information/discussions a billion times? I participate regularly on 3 discussion boards, and similar topics always crop up on at least two, sometimes all three, of the boards. I will sometimes participate on the same topic on different boards, but that's only in certain cases and under certain circumstances. Otherwise, it tends to be redundant to have the same conversation multiple times. Doesn't that end up being what happens if you're on multiple gathering sites?

I'm just going to live on this little island by myself. I'm getting closer and closer to being Bean all the time...